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TODAY:

India’s missile test latest sign that nuclear arms race is heating up

The president and the porn star

Supreme Court weighs in on airline passenger rights

More nukes, more danger

Indiabecame the latest country to flex its nuclear muscles this week, with the successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The current large-scale warheads are so devastating that their use is almost unthinkable, and policy makers fear that America’s enemies might take advantage of that baked-in reluctance to use them and attack with their own mini-bombs.

The mushroom cloud from the Castle Bravo nuclear blast in 1954. The U.S. test of its enormously powerful 15 megaton weapon was on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. (US Department of Energy)

A move away from the long-held MAD — mutually assured destruction — mindset opens the possibility of a new nuclear arms race, however. And there is growing resistance to the proposal.

Yesterday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov warned that North Korea is likely to see the end of the pact as proof that the rest of the world isn’t serious about halting nuclear proliferation. (Trump has declared that the U.S. will pull out of the agreement in five months unless its “terrible flaws” are addressed.)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warns that an end of the Iran nuclear deal could send a message that the world isn’t serious about damping nuclear proliferation. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the danger from weapons of mass destruction “seems to be gathering force.”

And there are reports that China’s new high-speed rail network has been fully integrated into its nuclear defence plans. The next generation Fuxing trains (“renaissance” in Mandarin) can speed at 400 km/h across a 22,000 km-long national network. A clear boon for travellers, but also for China’s military, which now has a fast and easy way to move troops, supplies, weapons, and even nuclear missiles around the country.

The president and the porn star

But a measure of how strained and strange U.S. politics have become might be found in the relative lack of coverage of allegations that might well destroy the career of any other elected official — claims that the president had an affair with an adult film actress.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, created a private company in Delaware — Essential Consultants LLC — in 2016, for the purpose of making a $130,000 payment to Daniels, using pseudonyms to obscure the transaction.

Cohen told the paper the president “vehemently denies” that there was any sexual relationship or hush money, and supplied a statement attributed to the actress that supported that position.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, created a private company in Delaware for the purpose of making a $130,000 payment to Daniels. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

But gossip magazine In Touch has since published a lengthy 2011 interview with Daniels, in which she makes a number of eye-popping claims about a relationship she says began at a 2006 Nevada golf tournament and carried on for years.

Anthony Weiner rubs his eyes during a candidate forum on small business in 2013. Weiner admitted to having illicit online exchanges with women even after he resigned from Congress amid a sexting scandal. (Richard Drew/Associated Press)

Some adult actors have tried to cross in the other direction, reinventing themselves as politicians.

Marey Carey, another performer, ran for governor of California in 2003, placing 10th in a field of 135 candidates.

Ilona Staller, better known as Cicciolina, was probably the most successful, co-founding Italy’s Love Party and serving for five years in the country’s Chamber of Deputies in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Silvio Berlusconi has faced a number of allegations about his sexual behaviour. (EPA)

Airline passenger rights

In 2014, Gabor Lukács, a Halifax-based passenger rights advocate, asked the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) to investigate Delta Airline‘s practice of bumping obese travellers from crowded flights, or making them buy an additional seat.

Canadian passenger rights advocate Gabor Lukács. (CBC)

The agency refused to look into the matter, however, on the basis that he wasn’t personally affected. (Lukács, who teaches math at Dalhousie University, estimates that he weighs in at a svelte 77 kilograms.)

This morning, the top court ruled that the CTA “unreasonably fettered its discretion” by denying the complaint and was effectively precluding “any public interest group or representative group from ever having standing before the Agency.”

Lukács asked the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) to investigate Delta Airline’s practice of bumping obese travellers from crowded flights, or making them buy an additional seat. (Toby Melville/Reuters)

It ordered the agency to take another look at Delta’s seating policy.

Airlines’ shoddy treatment of their paying customers has become a hot-button issue in recent years, fuelled by passengers’ ability to document every interaction with their phones and broadcast their complaints via social media.

Other recent lawsuits have attacked the issue of passenger comfort from a different direction.

In May an Australian man, Michael Anthony Taylor, sued American Airlines, alleging that he was severely injured during a December 2015 flight from Sydney to Los Angeles when he was forced to sit in a row with two “grossly obese” fellow travellers.

Transport Minister Marc Garneau introduced legislation ion 2017 to create a new passenger bill of rights, which will give travellers a better idea of when and how airlines will have to compensate them for travel issues. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Taylor’s lawsuit claimed that the body of the man next to him “spilt over” into his seat, forcing him to contort himself for the duration of the 14-hour flight. The ordeal exacerbated an existing spinal problem, he says, causing severe back and neck pain.

The case echoes another Australian suit filed in 2012, when James Bassos, an Etihad Airlines passenger, claimed back injuries after being seated next to an overweight man during a 2011 Dubai to Sydney flight. He sought $227,000 in compensation.

Etihad’s lawyers tried to have the matter thrown out, but a judge sent it to trail. The case was dismissed after Bassos passed away last year.

It’s not clear when the CTA will finally render a decision on the Delta complaint.

Emergency crews surround an Air Transat flight that sat for hours at the Ottawa airport on July 31, 2017. (Stephane Beaudoin/CBC)

It was a record-setting punishment. But that wasn’t good enough for Lukács. In January he filed suit over the matter, asking the Federal Court of Appeal to overturn the fine and send the case back to the CTA for reassessment.

Lukács contends that the fine was just a “slap on the wrist,” well-below the maximum $10,000 per passenger — close to $6 million in total — that could have been levied under the law.

“Exposing passengers to such extreme suffering should have consequences,” he told the CBC.

Quote of the moment

“How could somebody steal Jesus’ truck?”

– Roger Boyd, the head of the evangelical Men’s Street Ministry in Hamilton, reacting to the theft of his pickup. The vehicle, which Boyd and his wife use to deliver clothes and toiletries to the homeless, has a Bible in its cab.

Roger Boyd says the truck he uses for Men’s Street Ministry work in Hamilton was stolen from his driveway. (Roger Boyd)

What The National is reading

Alleged murderer of two men from Toronto’s gay village was a mall Santa (Vice)

Today in history

Jan. 19, 1945: The Italian campaign — On leave in Rome (radio)

CBC war correspondent W. J. “Bill” Herbert. (CBC)

CBC Radio correspondentBill Herbert investigates what Canuck troops get up to in the Eternal City. “The Canadians play in exactly the same was as they fight: hard,” he reports. “Bars are given a great deal of attention.”

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